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appealing because they were less rigid than the
required coursework for mechanical engineering.
As a part of SMU's curriculum for mechanical
engineering and through the co-op program, Pruitt
was hired during his sophomore year by Texas
Instruments (TI). He worked alongside George
Sabowski, a master machinist who had completed a
traditional European twenty-five-year apprenticeship
when he lived in Poland. Pruitt notes that TI was not
a teaching environment. Sabowski showed Pruitt the
basics of machine safety but left the young student to
work on his own. Here, Pruitt also learned to use a
mill and a lathe. At the time, one of the products
being made at TI was optical recognition devices for
computer chips. The microchips had to be precisely
soldered to a computer board. Pruitt's division built
prototype machines to accomplish those tasks.
Precision is one of the characteristics that marks
Pruitt's jewelry today.
His college expenses were covered through
scholarships, money earned as a residential assistant
and his work at Texas Instruments. But living in
Dallas and paying out-of-state tuition at a private
school was not inexpensive. During his freshman year
in 1991 he began to make body piercing jewelry. At
the time, this was a fairly open field with
MIDNIGHT RENDEZVOUS necklace of zirconium 702, stainless steel cable, rubber tubing; CNC machined, contour
ground, pulse arc welded, forced oxidization, sanded, 2013. ARTIST SKETCHES for Midnight Rendezvous. Photographs
courtesy of the artist, except where noted. Opposite page: SEXIEST MAN ALIVE (statement by wife, Maria Allison),
rings of 316L stainless steel; CNC machined, hand-finished, 2013. Photograph by Craig Smith, Heard Museum.
43 ORNAMENT 37.1.2013
own tools. Pruitt learned by watching Lewis and by
emulating what he saw. When Pruitt was learning to
properly bend a bracelet, he tried making and
bending one hundred or more copper ones in order
to successfully grasp the technique. But if he could
not figure out something, he would ask Lewis who
was willing to show him what he needed to know.
That experience of trial and error would serve Pruitt
later when he developed machinery to shape stainless
steel bracelets or experimented with other techniques
to accomplish unusual surface finishes.
Perhaps one of his more interesting life paths
was Pruitt's choice to attend Southern Methodist
University in Dallas. His older brother Dominic
attended SMU and the university offered an
appealing albeit highly competitive engineering
program. Freshman year was framed by traditional
classwork and subsequent years allowed students to
work and get paid in their fields of interest. But
college offered some other opportunities that would
affect Pruitt's creative processes. Pruitt also chose to
take classes in studio art electives such as threedimensional design and sculpture. He found that
defending the artwork in class forced him not only to
analyze his creative works but also to successfully
articulate his design plan. These classes were